stories of my family

Archive for the category “Migration”

William Hickson and George Byrne

I have known for some time that William Hickson (1832-1899) of Killorglin, who later migrated to America and then Australia, was a nailor. It says so clearly on his marriage certificate:

While looking through some records for George Byrne (1860-1929), who married William Hickson’s daughter Susie many years later in Australia, I discovered that his father, who was also named George, was also a nailor. It is recorded on George junior’s death certificate.

Death George Byrne:
July 28, 1929, Coast Hospital, Little Bay, Randwick
Late of 25 Cook Street, Lewisham
George Byrne, Clerk
69 years
Cerebral haemorrhage, Purpura haemorrhagica
Name and occupation of father: George Byrne, Nailor
Mother: Sarah Ruddle
When and where buried: 30 July 1929, Congregational Cemetery, Woronora
Name and religion of minister: William McFarlane, Brethren
Where born and how long in the Australian colonies, Killarney, Country Kerry, Ireland, 47 years
Place of marriage, age and to whom: Summerhill, 24, Susan Hickson
Children of marriage: Kathleen, Emily, Frances, William, Gertrude, Isobel. One male deceased.

This conflicts somewhat with a transcript of George’s birth record which I found through one of the genealogical search engines, which records his father as being a waiter:

I have wondered what it means, that he was a waiter. Killarney today may be full of restaurants with waiters but in 1860 when George was born it was probably not the tourist mecca that it is now. I have wondered if he was a waiter in a large hotel, or the house of an aristocratic family, but finding the answer has eluded me. What I suspect is that George’s father was not a waiter at all, but a nailor, as the later death record indicates, and that the above record contains a mistake in the transcription. The Irish Genealogy website does not contain an image of the original church record and the two words nailor and waiter could easily be confused.

George Byrne (senior) of Killarney has been an elusive character thus far in my family history research. I have not been able to find the date of either his birth or death, only his marriage in Killarney on 24 February 1857 to Sarah Ruddle. However, assuming he was around 25 at the time, he would have been born around 1832, the same year as William Hickson.

So George Byrne (senior) of Killarney, was a contemporary of William Hickson of Killorglin, and they were both nailors. However, whereas William would leave Ireland in 1865 and migrate to first America and then Australia, George lived out his whole life, as far as I know, in Ireland.

The nail and bolt industry

What is a nailor? It is not a trade or profession that is familiar to the modern reader. However, nailors were in great demand in the days before the manufacture of nails and bolts was automated in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was heavy work involving anvils and hammers and furnaces, somewhat akin to blacksmithing. Here is a description from industrial England which I found at a website cataloguing old occupations (http://rmhh.co.uk/occup/n-o.html):

In the early 19th century, in the neighbourhood of Birmingham alone, 60,000 people – men, women and children – were involved in the hand manufacture of iron nails. They turned out something like 200 tons of nails, of numerous varieties and levels of quality, every week. Commonly an entire family would work together, confining themselves to a particular class of nail.

There were about 300 sorts of wrought or forged iron nails alone. Specific names suggest the uses to which they were put – deck, wheelwright, hurdle, mop, etc. Further terms such as rose, clasp, diamond, pearl and sunken describe the shape of the nail head; and flat, sharp, spear, needle and refer to their points. The terms fine, bastard and strong described their thickness.

The very finest quality nails were used for horseshoes; each nail required at least 35 blows of the hammer to draw it out fine enough to prevent it from cracking or breaking off in the horse’s hoof. Most nails required at least 25 blows of the hammer to form them. When the shank had been drawn out from the red hot rod to the required length, it was inserted into a heading tool, cut, turned and struck on the anvil. During this process, the bellows had to be worked several times.

The workers who forged the nails on the anvil were known as Nailors or Naylors. Each could make as many as four nails a minute – that’s up to 3,000 a day.

What has happened to the traditional nail maker has happened to many other classes of industrial worker, who have seen their crafts swallowed up by automated processes or superceded by new inventions.

A book published in 1989 about nail making in the Midlands is called “Glory Gone: the Story of Nailing in Bromsgrove,” by Bill Kings & Margaret Cooper (Halfshire Books, 1989/1999).

‘Glory gone’ was the ironic comment of Bromsgrove’s last nailmaker on the area’s former staple trade. At its mid-nineteenth century peak it employed over three thousand people, 30 per cent of the population. Most of the physical evidence — the nailshops, cottages and warehouses — has long disappeared; but a visitor to the area one, even two, hundred years ago would have heard, seen and smelt the making of nails. This book tells the story of the hand wrought nail trade in the Bromsgrove area, examining the contrast between the prosperity of the sellers of nails, the masters and foggers, and the dreadful poverty of those who made those same nails, among them a high proportion of women and children. There is an account of the century-long struggle against low wages and the illegal truck system and a look at what nailers did when they were not toiling at the nailblock. Finally, there are short firsthand accounts recalling childhood days spent among nailers by four men and women who a decade ago were the last living links with the staple trade.

The Hickson and Byrne families

William Hickson married Mary Needham in 1858 in Templenoe, County Kerry (see marriage certificate). They were both 25. They had three children before migrating from Ireland to America in 1865. These Irish Hicksons were Richard (b.1859), Suzie (b.1861) and Lizzie (b.1863). The other three of their children, Sara, William and Charlie, were born in America, in the area near Boston where they lived. William worked, I believe, as a whitesmith. Then in 1877-78 they returned to Ireland for a short time before migrating again to Australia. During that short interlude in Ireland Suzie, my great grandmother, was around 16 years old. After moving to Australia I believe that William worked in his younger brother John’s timber company. The family appear to have been fairly well off. William died in 1899 but his wife Mary survived into the twentieth century and died in 1916 when the world was at war.

George Byrne married Sarah Ruddle in 1857 in Killarney. Their ages are not recorded on the marriage certificate. Information about their lives and family is scanty. I am uncertain of how many children they had, but I am aware of two sons who migrated to Australia: George (junior) was born in 1860 in Killarney (see above), and Richard around 10 years later in 1870. There were no doubt many others in between (and George junior may not have been the first) but I have no record of the others.

Where and when George and Sarah died and were buried is at present unknown to me, but I believe that George probably died before 1876, in his mid forties. I have a copy of a document recording George junior’s indenture to Roger Martin, a general merchant in Killorglin, in 1876. It is signed by George’s mother, Sarah Byrne, which suggests that his father was dead. George was 15 or 16 at the time and served Roger Martin for 5 years, after which he migrated to Australia. I suspect that Richard Byrne may have also been indentured to Roger Martin 10 years later, before he too migrated to Australia, but I have no evidence of this at present. I have previously written about a possible Richard Byrne-Roger Martin connection.

There are lots of commonalities in the Hickson and Byrne families. Both William Hickson and George Byrne (senior) were nailors. Both married around the same time – George first, to Sarah Ruddle, in 1857, and a year later William, to Mary Needham. Both couples appear to have been living in Killarney around 1860 and the years after that, since that is where William and Mary’s first three children were born, and where George and Sarah’s son George was born.

The two families were joined in 1885 when George junior, recently arrived in Sydney from Ireland married Suzie. George and Suzie Byrne were my mother’s Irish born grandparents. They had six children, five girls (one of whom was my grandmother) and a boy. George was a businessman and worked for IXL jams in Sydney. They were staunch members of the Brethren assemblies in Sydney.

The Brethren connection

It is this connection with the Brethren that fascinates me. The Hicksons and the Byrnes were both Protestant families in predominantly Catholic Kerry. In 1861 a revival broke out amongst the Protestants in Kerry, initially in the area around Templenoe where Mary Hickson (Needham) lived before her marriage to William Hickson. The revival resulted in the formation of Plymouth Brethren assemblies in Ireland. Mary’s family were profoundly affected by the revival – her four youngest brothers all became evangelists in North America, part of the spiritual awakening connected with DL Moody’s ministry. There seems little doubt that William and Mary were members of the Plymouth Brethren in Kerry before they departed for America, and that they carried this version of the Christian faith with them first to America and later to Australia.

George and Suzie Byrne, after they married in Sydney in 1885, raised a family in the strict traditions of the Brethren assemblies. The effects of this on their six children were not entirely positive – but that is another story. However, it indicates that George Byrne was almost certainly a part of the Brethren movement in Kerry prior to his migration to Australia in 1882. This in turn makes me fairly certain that his parents, George and Sarah, were part of a Brethren assembly in Killarney.

The two nailors of Derryquin

It is all conjecture, but all this leads me to the belief that William Hickson and George Byrne were friends in Kerry in the 1850s and 60s. They were the same age and were both nailors. William was from Killorglin and George from Killarney, but William lived in Sneem as a young man and it seems likely that he worked on the Derryquin Estate, near Sneem. I suspect his parents had taken the family there in search of work at the time of the Great Famine. William’s father was also a nailor. Although I have at present no evidence, I wonder if George Byrne also moved to Sneem during the late forties or early fifties. I like to believe that it was in Sneem and at Derryquin that William and George’s friendship was established. There is no doubt that the estate employed a number of nailors, as described by TE Stoakley in his book, Sneem, the Knot in the Ring:

Derryquin formed a community that was largely self-supporting. There was timber in plenty and a saw pit where sawyers were kept busy converting the logs into the planks, boards and scantlings for the carpenter’s shop where doors and sashes were made and all the innumerable odds and ends of estate joinery were done. There was a forge where the tenants horses were shod and all the general smithy work was done, even the manufacture of bolts and nails. (p.77)

William met his future wife in Sneem. Her name was Mary Needham and she was the oldest daughter of the Needham family of Templenoe, a village just a few miles east of Sneem toward Kenmare. William married Mary in 1858, but by that time, according to their wedding certificate, William was living in Killarney. Their first three children were all born in Killarney.

George actually married the year before William, in 1857. His wife was Sarah Ruddle, and church records show that they married in Killarney. Whether Sarah was a Killarney girl from the beginning or not is uncertain. I have little knowledge of George and Sarah’s children, but I know that they had at least two sons born respectively in 1860 and 1870, in Killarney. They were named George and Richard, and both would end up migrating to Australia, George in 1882 and Richard about 10 years later.

Both the Hicksons and the Byrnes seem to have been quite impacted by the Kerry Revival that broke out in Templenoe and Sneem in 1861, even if both young families were by that time living in Killarney. The two families may have been part of the same Brethren assembly in Killarney in the early 1860s.

Separation

But then William and Mary and their young family decided to emigrate, and were thus separated from their friends George and Sarah and their children, who stayed behind in Kerry. The Hickson children grew up near Boston in the USA while the Byrne children grew to maturity in County Kerry.

Then in 1877 the Hicksons came back. Sadly, William’s old friend George had died a few years before and Sarah was a young widow. How she fed her family I have no idea, though her son George, who was in the first year of his apprenticeship in Killorglin to the general merchant, Roger Martin, would have been helping pay the bills. But it must have been exciting for her to meet her old friends, William and Mary, and for the children of the two families to get to know each other. Three of the Hickson children had never seen Ireland before, and there were several Byrne children who had not been born when William and Mary had left with their little family in 1865.

Suzie Hickson was 16 when they came home, just a year younger than George and Sarah’s oldest son, George. I have a feeling that the seeds of a romance between George and Suzie were planted during that short sojourn of the Hickson family in Ireland, those few fleeting months before the Hickson family emigrated for the second time, this time to Australia. I suspect that it was in those months that George decided his future. He would serve his time with Roger Martin and support his mother and siblings, but then he too would emigrate. He realised that his destiny lay in Australia, with the girl who had captured his heart, his Irish-American-Australian sweetheart. But it would be five long years before he would see her again.

Sarah Byrne, however, would never see her friends William and Mary Hickson again. As far as I can discern neither William (who died in 1899) nor Mary (who survived until 1916) ever returned to Ireland, and Sarah never saw Australia. The two nailers of Derryquin had waved farewell to each other for the last time in 1865 when the Hicksons left for America. In 1878 their wives did the same, as the Hicksons sailed away again, for a new life in Australia.

The date was October 5th and both William and Mary were 25 years of age. William Hickson’s occupation was “nailor” and his residence was Killorglin. Mary Needham’s occupation is blank and her residence was in Cloverfield.

Killorglin is a well known town in Kerry, but I cannot locate a Cloverfield on any maps. A quick internet search brings up a nice old house called Cloverfield House, which is just south of Killarney, but it seems unlikely that Mary lived there. The Needham family lived in Templenoe, on the northern bank of Kenmare Bay, some miles south of Killarney and over the mountains. William and Mary were married at Templenoe Church. So where was Cloverfield?

It is possible that Mary was a housemaid at a country house, but surely then an occupation would be listed for her. If she had already terminated her employment in order to get married then surely her address would be listed as Templenoe.

The Hicksons of Killorglin and the Needhams of Templenoe

Mary’s father George is listed as Parish Clerk. Family tradition says that he was a captain in the Kerry Coastguard. But in 1858 he was already 56 years old and so it is likely that he had long since left the sea. He was a widower, since his wife had died two years earlier. But what did the Parish Clerk do? Did he work for the church? Or for the local council? He clearly performed clerical duties – his was a desk job.

But though he was a man of letters and numbers, George Needham was not gentry. He was the tenant of a local landowner, a certain Richard Mahoney, who lived in Dromore Castle, just down the road from the Needham home, which stood next to the Petty Sessions Court House and the local school. Richard’s father, Denis Mahony, is listed as George’s landlord on the Griffith’s Valuation on 1852, but by the time of William and Mary’s marriage, old Denis Mahony was dead.

William’s father Richard was, like William, a “nailor.” This occupation does not exist nowadays, but according to a dictionary of old occupations, a nailor was a metalworker who manufactured nails, which showed that the Hicksons were a working class family.

But despite this humble occupation it would seem the Hicksons were one of the noble families of Kerry. They could trace their ancestry back several hundred years through their connections with the Hickson family of Fermoyle and Dingle, who appear in the well known publication, Burke’s Landed Gentry.

Whether their noble heritage was of any importance to William Hickson or his father is unknown. But the youngest brother, John Christopher Hickson, the last in the Hickson family, seems to have been proud of his aristocratic connections. As one of the “new rich” in Sydney many years later John would name his home in Sydney The Grove, after a large house in Dingle which he referred to as the “family seat.”

Like George Needham, Richard Hickson was also a widower in 1858 when William and Mary married. His wife Mary Ann had died in 1853, when three of her seven children were still under 10 years old. John, the youngest, was just 5 years old when his mother died.

Migrations

The year their mother died the oldest of the Hickson family, Susan, migrated to Australia. Two years later, in 1855, the next two sisters, Mary and Ellen, also migrated to Australia. What prompted them to go is hard to know, but they had lived through the years of the Potato Famine which ravaged Ireland from 1845 to 1852, and had known much hardship. Their mother was dead. Thousands of people across Ireland were migrating, mostly to America, but some to Australia or other destinations. Prospects in Ireland seemed poor.

It was the girls of the Hickson family who were the pioneers, as far as migration was concerned, heading for the distant colony of New South Wales. Only one ended up there, in Sydney, the other two after they married eventually going further, to Victoria and Western Australia respectively.

Protestants in a Catholic community

How William Hickson met Mary Needham is open to conjecture, but contact through the church seems the most likely. They were both Protestants in a predominantly Catholic community. According to the National Archives of Ireland website for 1911, Kerry was one of 7 counties of Ireland where Catholics accounted for more than 95% of the population. According to another website Protestants accounted for just 3.3% of the population of Kerry in 1861.

The population of Kerry had plummeted over the decade from 1850 to 1860, with over 50,000 emigrating, more than 20% of the county’s population. Proportionately more Protestants had left than Catholics, and this continued. Anti-protestant feelings over the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century led to a continuing haemorrhage of Protestants form the area. By 1911 there were “just 3,623 Church of Ireland members, 251 Methodists, 249 Presbyterians, 26 Jews, 67 members of various other assorted religions, and two people who refused to disclose what, if any, religion they held.” (National Archives of Ireland website.)

William and Mary were both part of the small Protestant community in Kerry. In 1858, the year they married, there can hardly have been more than five or six thousand Protestants in the county. A meeting between them, even if they lived a good few miles apart, and attended different churches, is not hard to imagine. And so the Hickson and Needham families were joined.

Marrying into the Needham family

Although Mary took William’s name I have the feeling that William left the Hicksons to marry Mary, rather than the other way around. Though they probably initially lived in Killorglin, I believe the couple eventually settled in Sneem, which was much closer to the Needham family home in Templenoe than to where William’s family lived. As already mentioned, William was a nailor, like his father, but it seems he became a smith, specifically a whitesmith. In those early years of their marriage they must surely have had frequent contact with Mary’s father and her nine younger siblings. Mary had been like a stand in parent after their own mother had died some years earlier, and it is likely that even after her marriage she remained in close contact with her younger brothers and sisters, as well as her ageing father.

Soon after they were married, William and Mary began a family of their own. Their first child, Richard, was born in 1859 and their second, Susie, in 1861. Then third, Mary-Anne, or Lizzie as she was always known, was born in 1863 or 4, not long before the family left Ireland for good.

So there were a lot of children in William and Mary’s lives in those early years of their marriage in Ireland. They had a lot of contact with Mary’s siblings, in particular, who lived so close. In 1858 when they married, her four youngest brothers were all still at school. George was 12, but Benjamin, Thomas and William were respectively 5, 4 and 2.

William’s younger siblings the year he married were a little older than the Needham youngsters: Kate was 14, George 13 and John 10, all living in Killorglin with their father. His three older sisters, Susan, Mary and Ellen had all left for Australia.

Evangelical revival and the Needhams

In 1861 there was a Christian revival within the Protestant church in Kerry, centred on the area in which William and Mary lived. The key figures in the revival were two of the local gentry, who happened to be close friends to each other: FC Bland and RJ Mahony. RJ (Richard) Mahony was the Needham’s landlord. FC Bland lived in a large house very close to William and Mary, in Sneem. The revival doubtless had a strong impact on William and Mary, as well as on the wider Needham family. The Hicksons of Killorglin, who lived further away, were likely less impacted, but William Hickson was like the Needhams, in the thick of things.

In 1863 with the revival in Kerry still in progress, Kate and her brother George Hickson migrated to Australia to join their older siblings, leaving young John, by then 15, the only one of the family still in Killorglin with his father. I believe that around that time John and his father went to live in Sneem with William and Mary. How they responded to the religious enthusiasm of William and Mary is uncertain. I have also wondered how the Catholic community in general viewed the religious antics of the Protestant gentry and their followers.

Migration to America

Two years later in 1865 William and Mary decided to migrate to North America, and William’s father went with them. Why they chose America and not Australia, where five of William’s siblings had already gone, is uncertain. It seems that while the Hickson’s chose Australia, the Needhams chose America, and William, having in a sense married into the Needham family, followed the Needham trend. His father came with him because he was too old to make the journey to Australia, where all his other children were, on his own.

Why did the Needhams choose America? I have wondered if it had something to do with the revival that they had experienced in 1861 and the years following. There had been a revival in Chicago in 1857 triggered partly by the preaching of a young evangelist DL Moody, and although civil war had broken out in 1861 over the vexed question of slavery in America, a minor revival had begun among soldiers during the latter years of the war as young battle weary men turned back to God. DL Moody was involved there too. Though he was a conscientious objector to military service he nevertheless made repeated visits to the battlefront to preach to the troops (Wikipedia).

Perhaps it was this movement of God’s Spirit in America, that attracted the Needham family to the area where they would eventually settle and live out their lives. DL Moody would play a significant part in their lives in the ensuing decades, particularly the lives of the four youngest of the Needham family, who all became evangelists. For Protestants from Kerry who had been enlivened by the fire of the Holy Spirit, and who lived in an environment of at best suspicion and at worse open hostility from the Catholic majority, Boston would have been an attractive destination.

Kerry, DL Moody and the Needhams

The connection between Moody and Ireland was not limited to the Needhams. In 1867, while visiting England, Moody met FC Bland, who had been one of the gentleman catalysts of the revival in Kerry, and a near neighbour of William and Mary (Needham) Hickson. The result of that meeting is described in a biography of DL Moody.

F.C. Bland, the High Sheriff of Kerry County, Ireland, was an influential worldling who became a Christian in the 1861 Kerry Revival. Bright, articulate and well educated, he quickly became a deep and perceptive student of the Bible. J. Edwin Orr wrote that Bland “drank deeply of Brethren teaching without ever joining their ranks,” presumably remaining a communicating member of the Church of Ireland. After Moody and Bland met in 1867, Moody was markedly impressed by the layman’s biblical knowledge and teaching skill. The two became friends, and, as Orr phrased it, the result was “Bland becoming Bible consultant of Dwight L. Moody.” (Dorset LW, A Passion for Souls, Moody Publishers, Chicago, 1997. p.140)

But by 1867 William, Mary, their three children (a third, Lizzie, was born in 1865) and William’s ageing father had all moved to America. Mary’s father, George, had died sometime between 1858 and 1863. In 1863 young Thomas Needham, aged 13, went to sea. By the end of the 1860s all of the Needhams had gone to America.

John Hickson persuades William to come to Australia

After the departure of William and his father for America, the only member of the Hickson family still in Ireland was John. It is unclear why he hadn’t left with his brother and father, and what he did in Ireland in the years after their departure is also uncertain. But in 1870 at the age of 22 he too decided to migrate, choosing Australia rather than joining his older brother William in Boston.

John married an Australian girl not long after his arrival. She was the daughter of freed convicts, her mother having been transported from County Down in Northern Ireland back in the 1830s. John and his wife raised a family of ten children and prospered greatly in Sydney and became very wealthy. He was a timber merchant with mills on the north coast of New South Wales as well as in Sydney.

He missed his older brother, and got it in his head that William and his family would be better off in Sydney than Boston. It may have been that William and Mary had run into problems of some kind in America. Perhaps the life they had hoped for had not eventuated, and John prevailed on them to come to Australia instead, the land of opportunity.

In 1877 John finally managed to persuade William and Mary to leave Boston, where they had lived for almost twelve years, and come to Australia. In this way Mary became the only one of the Needhams who ended up in Australia rather than North America. It was thus that my Irish-American great grandmother, Susie Hickson, arrived in Australia in 1878, a fresh faced 17 year old girl.

Looking back and looking forward

The following year Susie’s big brother, Richard, turned 20. The family, with seven children in all, had been in Sydney a little over a year, and were no doubt still in the adjustment phases after the upheaval of their second migration (the first for the last four children who were all American born). John Hickson, who had been the catalyst for their relocation, penned a birthday poem to his nephew, a copy of which has come down to me.

The first half of the poem recalls their lives together in Ireland before any of them had left for distant lands. It indicates that Richard had been born in Killorglin, on the Laune River, rather than Sneem, where his parents later settled. Killorglin was of course the home town of the Hicksons. John was just 11 years old when his nephew, Richard was born. It must have been a few years later that the teenage John went to live with his brother and sister in law in Sneem. Here are the first six stanzas of the poem, in which John looks back to the past:

J.C. Hickson to his nephew Richard Hickson on his 20th birthday, 31st July 1879.

The day was advancing, the bright sun was pouring Its beams through the leaves of the Elms in the Grove, The lark which the morn had seen loftily soaring, Had descended to guard the soft nest of it’s love.

The fair Laune was flowing in majestic splendour, The trout replied brisk to the angler’s fly, The reeds in the distance rose brighter and grander, All nature seemed pleased that last day of July.

O’er the field the light breezes of midsummer softly The meadows and bright corn whispering wooed Midst their shade undisturbed sang the Cormeraks gaily And the Cuckoo’s note rang loud tones from the wood.

Mid scenes of such beauty and fullest enjoyment, This baby was born with tribute to pay I have spared a few moments for mental employment, To coin a few lines for his twentieth birthday.

As a child in his cradle I rocked him to slumber Oft his bright chubby form I have nursed on my knee But as boy our firm friendship was riven asunder, For early he crossed o’er Atlantic’s blue sea.

For years in the land where Stars and Stripes gaily Float proudly o’er freedom’s intelligent race;- His boyhood was spent but on my mind daily Engraved the last sight of his bright happy face.

Time sped, and the web of life’s intricate weaving Revolved till again on Australia’s fair strand After crossing the ocean with billows upheaving I felt on these shores the firm grasp of his hand.

There follow a whole lot of reflections on life and the poem concludes with two stanzas of encouragement for the future that lies before young Richard as he embarks on adulthood in his newly adopted home. It is interesting to note in the first line a sense of uncertainty about Richard’s future: would he stay in Australia, or would he return to the USA, the land he likely thought of as home. What was he thinking? Who was he missing? And how did he feel about the future?

If this fair southern land be the scene of thy fame, E’en though by adoption, its freedom uphold, With jealousy guard against taunt thy fair name As life’s fitful picture before thee unfold.

I wish you success in each business of life Be guided by prudence and wisdom and love; And when your course run you shall cease from the strife, May your labours find rest in the haven above.

Richard never returned to America as far as I know. He married and had six children whose descendants live in and around Sydney. I have no knowledge or contact with any of them. His parents, William and Mary, lived out their days in Sydney and are buried there. Their daughter Suzie married an Irishman and raised a family in Sydney. One of their daughters was my grandmother. The third of the Irish born children in the family, Lizzy, also married but never had any biological children. She and her husband adopted a daughter. The four other Hickson children, all born in America, I have very scant knowledge of.

John Hickson clearly had a soft spot for Richard. When John liked someone it was obvious and he showered them with favours. Unfortunately he also disliked some people strongly, and that was equally obvious. When his daughter, some years later, fell for another of his countrymen, the young Richard Byrne, recently arrived from Kerry, John did everything in his power to hinder their relationship. But that is another story that I have told elsewhere.

The Hickson and Needham heritage

While the Hickson story was one of material prosperity in Australia, the Needham legacy in North America was more a spiritual one. But when William and Mary came to Australia in 1878 they brought some of that with them, the Moody effect. And even if none of John Hickson’s material wealth has lasted through the generations to me and my family, I have certainly felt the influence of Mary (Needham) Hickson’s religious tendencies in my lifetime come down to me through her daughter Susie, and Susie’s daughter Gertrude, and through Gert’s daughter, my mother.

Many streams and rivers run down the eastern fall of the mountains of northern Scotland, the Highlands, as they are called. The valleys they form, though narrow and wild at their heads, spread out into gentler, lusher lands as they approach the east coast, where these now broad, deep rivers flow into the firths that are the fjords of Scotland. Is is these valleys, called straths, that were home to the sparse population of the Highlands since time immemorial, since they afforded both shelter from weather that blows its rains and snows across the bleak higher ground, and lush, fertile land to support the grazing of animals and the growing of crops.

The Strathcarron near the junction between the Carron and Cullenach rivers. Glencalvie lies beyond the trees. View from Croick Church.

One such valley is the Strathcarron, with its dark running river, the Carron, eventually emptying into the Kyle of Sutherland which becomes the Dornoch Firth. The Carron is not a long river, running barely twenty miles from its source in the mountains of Ross-Shire to its mouth. It receives a number of tributaries on its journey to the coast, the major one being the Cullenach which runs in from the north near a tiny settlement called Amat, about 8 miles upstream from Bonar Bridge, where the Carron joins the Kyle.

Standing a little way up on the slope on the northern bank of this stream, very close to its junction with the Carron, there is an old church, at a place called Croick. This last May I visited Croick Church with my Scottish friend Hamish. We had driven up the valley from Ardgay, a village that lies at the head of the Dornoch Firth, having that morning driven from Inverness where we had been staying with friends, a retired minister of the Church of Scotland and his wife. I wanted to see this little church which unexpectedly achieved fame in Scotland and England in the 1840s.

Croick Church, Easter Ross

Croick Church appears to be in the middle of nowhere, an unadorned cement-rendered structure surrounded by some old trees, with a churchyard ringed by a dry stone wall covered in moss. Looking out from the churchyard there is little to be seen by way of human habitation, just a solitary farmhouse a few hundred metres away down the valley. Slopes covered with heather run up to ridges on each side, and the curve of the valley prevents a view of the higher reaches of the river. The day we visited the sky was grey, the grass a mix of green and yellow, the heather on the heights still brown, with little colour to relieve the general melancholy of the landscape. It was easy to wonder why there should be a church here at all, out in the wilderness, with few to attend Sunday Services apart from some wandering sheep. Who comes here, we wondered?

Yet in 1827 the government of Scotland had decided to build a church here, and there must have been a reason for that. When we entered the church we were confronted with the following sign with a lot of the incumbents over the last two centuries:

The lands that are now relatively deserted and given over to the grazing of sheep and the pursuit of hunting and fishing were clearly once home to many people, and the Strathcarron of today has been called an “abandoned community” by a blog with the same name. But how did it come to be so?

A plaque by the road outside the church tells the story:

The story of the Glencalvie clearance in 1845 was told at the time in The Times of London, which had dispatched a journalist to cover the event, one of a long series of evictions in the Scottish Highlands which took place over a century from the late 1700s. The story has been retold many times, with two of the most comprehensive coverages to be found in John Prebble’s book, The Highland Clearances, and Eric Richard’s more recent account in his book of the same name.

We walked around the quiet interior of the church and tried to make out the scratchings on the east window. There is one that has caught the attention of visitors since that time and which still does not fail to tug at the heart when it is seen. It reads, “Glencalvie people – The Wicked Generation.” Not least has it inspired a novel of the Clearances by the same name, The Wicked Generation (Alison Johnson, 1993), a book which paints a vivid picture of those troubled times, though it is completely fictional and set in the Western Isles and not in Strathcarron at all. Why did the people call themselves this? How could they see themselves as “wicked.” Surely the wickedness of those days was that of the landlords who drove them away. But like people throughout history, they must have wondered why. Why were they being driven from their homes? What had they done to deserve this? True, they had mounted a little resistance when the first notices were first served a few years previously. But in the end they had succumbed largely without a fight, accepting their exile as their fate, perhaps sensing that they in some way deserved no better. Whether or not they felt this was the judgement of God for their sins is impossible to know, they seemed aware of a certain spiritual poverty, and though they had suddenly become homeless strangers on the earth, they may have taken comfort from the words of Jesus, so often preached from the pulpit of their church, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The Glencalvie people were surely aware that they were poor in spirit that week in May 1845. The kingdom of heaven was their only comfort, cold comfort as it might seem to us, the irreligious of today.

170 years before Hamish and I stood in the same place, some ninety people from the nearby Glencalvie Estate set up camp in this very churchyard. They had been evicted from their homes and were en route to a world unknown and uncertain for them. They remained in the churchyard for a week or so before going on. Very few of their number found anywhere to live in the immediate area, and the majority simply disappeared, presumably to coastal communities, to other parts of Scotland, to England, or perhaps to the rest of the world, joining the growing stream of migrants away from the Highlands and to the colonies of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.

Poor people of the day generally walked. There were no trains in the Highlands in the 1840s. Cars and trucks were unknown. There were carts and carriages to carry goods and people if they had the money. The people of Glencalvie were not the only people living in the Strathcarron, of course. There were many others who watched as they left their homes. The report in The Times describes their arrival at the churchyard, where makeshift tents had been set up to temporarily accommodate them:

I am told it was a most wretched spectacle to see these poor people march out of the glen in a body, with two or three carts filled with children, many of them mere infants, and other carts containing their bedding and other requisites. The whole countryside was up on the hills watching them as they steadily took possession of their tent. (The Times, Monday, June 2, 1845)

When they left, a week or so later, they made their way down the valley towards Ardgay and Bonar Bridge. Most of them were leaving their beloved strath forever. Many of them would have straggled through the little village of Gledfield before they came to Ardgay. One of the first houses they passed in Gledfield was the home of the village blacksmith, James Ross, and his family. James had thirteen children, ranging in age from 1 to 22 years old in 1845. Some 25 years earlier, before he had married or started a family, a younger James had witnessed the Strath Oykel clearance just north of Gledfield, when some 600 people had been forced to leave their homes to make way for sheep. Now he watched another exodus of people, this time from his own strath, and as he watched he surely wondered what the future of the Highlands would be like. How would the world be for his children. James was already over fifty and was knew he would likely end his days in Gledfield, but the children’s lives were just beginning. What would happen to them, he wondered, and where would they end up?

One of the thirteen children bore the same name as his father, James Ross. He was my grandmother’s grandfather, and was just 18 years old at the time of the Glencalvie Clearance. He was likely watching too as the people of Glencalvie left. Within five years he too would leave. He found employment as a servant in an English house in the south, far from his birthplace. He married a girl from Wales and they settled eventually near Liverpool, where he plied his trade as a journeyman joiner. But in the meantime, in the Highlands, his younger sister Helen, and their little brother Andrew, had decided for a new life even further afield, sailing for Australia in 1857, just two years after yet another cruel clearance (Greenyards) had taken place in the Strathcarron, very close to their home. Nine years later, in 1866, James junior would pack up his family in Liverpool, and, with his youngest sister Jane who had joined them from the Highlands, would sail away for the far side of the world. That same year, 1866, his father, James Andrew Ross, blacksmith of Gledfield, died and was buried in the churchyard of Kincardine in the beloved Highlands that they had left forever.

The ruins of the Gledfield smithy, which the Glencalvie people passed on their way to places near and far.

Ardgay, between Gledfield and Kincardine, looking south from Bonar Bridge across the Dornoch Firth

Sometime around 1821 or 1822 James Andrew Ross (1794-1866) of Edderton, Ross-Shire, married Catherine Urquhart (1800-1887) of Golspie, Sutherland. They had at least 12 children over the next 25 years, though there may have been more since children so often died in infancy in those days. James was a blacksmith and he set up shop, and established a home in Gledfield, about 9 miles north west of Edderton, near where the Carron River flows into the Kyle of Sutherland, which becomes the Dornoch Firth.

It was a big family. There were 8 boys and 5 girls. Donald was firstborn (1823) and after him came Ann (1824). John followed in 1826 and James in 1827. Six more children were born in the 1830s – Helen, Catherine (Katie), Andrew, George and Alexander (Sandy) and Mary. Malcolm was born in 1840, Hector in 1843 and finally Jane in 1844. There is one anomaly, namely that Mary Ross, born 1839, is listed as Mary Ann Ross McLachlan in the 1851 census. The significance of her extra name is hard to explain. Was she adopted? There are no other McLachlans in the family, but it is possible that she was a relative whose parents died. She does not appear in the 1861 census, but may have been married by that time. I have no other information about her.

Of the boys 6 became blacksmiths, which was understandable given James’ trade. Donald, John, Andrew, George, Malcolm and Hector all followed their father’s trade. James took up carpentry, later becoming a journeyman joiner. Sandy became a teacher. Of the girls, Ann married in her early twenties and had three children, although her husband died in his twenties, soon after the birth of the third. Helen and Jane married in Australia. Kate remained at home and cared for her ageing parents until her tragic death, drowned in the Carron River at age 48.

Four of the Ross family migrated. First Andrew and his sister Helen left in 1857. They sailed on the Alfred from Liverpool. Both Andrew and Helen married in Australia, Andrew to Janet Anderson, another Scot, and Helen to James Redstone, an English immigrant. Both families settled in the Bellinger Valley of northern NSW. Nine years later, in 1866, James Ross, his wife and four children, migrated. They sailed on a ship called the Africana, and his youngest sister, Jane Ross, sailed with them. James and Mary Ross remained in Sydney, where James continued his trade as a carpenter and joiner. They had more children. Jane, however, moved north to her brother Andrew and his young family. Jane ended up marrying the Andrew’s wife’s brother, David Anderson. So of the four Rosses to migrate three died in the Bellingen area, but James Ross died and is buried in Sydney.

Of the nine children who remained in Scotland, two never married – Kate and Hector. Ann married Hugh Aird and they had three children before Hugh died in 1855 at the age of 28. One of their daughters, Hughina, married the schoolmaster at Gledfield, but died at the age of 42 in 1894. What became of Donald and George Ross I have yet to discover. John moved to England where for a time he lived with his brother James, in Birkenhead near Liverpool. However, John died in 1862 when he was only 36 years of age. He is buried in Kincardine. He was survived by his wife Betsy and their children. Sandy became a teacher and ended up the schoolmaster at Ferintosh. He too married and had a family. What became of Mary I have no information about.

Malcolm and Hector took over the family business, the Gledfield smithy, after their father died in 1866, the same year that James and Jane left for Australia. Malcolm was 26 and Hector 23 that year. Neither was married. They lived in Gledfield with their unmarried sister Kate and their ageing mother. Malcolm eventually married Jane Munro, but they never had any children. Both are buried in the Kincardine churchyard. Kate died in 1879. Malcolm died in 1897 at age 57 and his wife Jane lived to the age of 59, dying in 1911 in Edinburgh.

At the dawn of the twentieth century only 57 year old Hector was left in Gledfield. He was unmarried and lived in the house next to the smithy. Only three of his siblings survived into the 1900s – a brother in Scotland and two sisters in Australia. Sandy died in 1902. Helen and Jane lived on the far side of the world, in rural Australia. They died in 1916 and 1905 respectively.

Hector Ross. Downloaded from Ancestry.com. From Judy Horrigan.

I recently received a copy of a letter that was sent to Don Robinson by someone who knew the family, a certain Harriet Smith, of Ardgay. Don must have met her on his travels. The letter is dated 1978. Here is a slightly edited extract (thanks to Judy Horrigan who sent me a scanned copy):

I can only tell you little bits I know about them told me by my late Mother – born March 1872 died June 1968 – so she was well acquainted with them. She was a very near neighbour of theirs and in her early teens was engaged as their domestic help. The house then consisted of Hector, Malcolm, and their old bedridden mother and Malcolm’s wife, Jeannie (Jane). My mother spoke quite a lot to me of her early service there. There was a big family of sons and as far as I remember it included a Donald, George, Alexander (Sandy) and I know there was a sister Katie who was accidentally drowned in the River Carron quite close by. I was born 1906 and so I do remember Hector and saw him often at his work in the “smiddy.” I never saw Malcolm and Auntie Jeannie died in an Edinburgh hospital in 1910 following an operation.

The old mother was senile and very restless and troubled in her mid due to this. Malcolm was very fond of his mother and never went out from his meals but went to her bedside and spoke a comforting word to her and I always remember my mother telling me that he’d say, “What is it mother? God so loved that he gave his only Beloved Son__” Both brothers were very good Christian men. Uncle Malcolm had a lovely singing voice and used to sit at the fireside singing hymns – a favourite chorus was,
“I am coming Lord, coming now to thee.
Wash me, cleanse me in the blood that flowed at Calvary.”

… Hector never married but lived on in the home with a succession of housekeepers and when he got too old for their care he went to live in the little village of Edderton which is nine miles south of Ardgay with people of the name of Aird. You say who were the Airds? Well I’m sure that I’m not making a mistake when I say that Donald Aird, who kept a little grocers shop there, was a nephew of H & M. Another niece, Donald Aird’s sister, was married to a local schoolmaster here G G McLeod – his family tombstone is very close to Uncle Malcolm’s. G G McLeod had a big family of daughters (9 I think) and one son, another James. I’m sure Donald Aird had a son, “Hector.”

Hector died in 1929 and is buried with his parents and his sister Kate in the churchyard in Kincardine. As far as I know there are no Rosses of this family left in the Gledfield-Ardgay-Kincardine area now, though there are possibly McLeods and Airds.

Family grave of James and Catherine Ross, also Catherine (Katie) their daughter and Hector their son. Headstone erected by Hector.

The following is from a record that I have from Don Robinson, who researched the Ross family in the 1990s. My grandmother was Winifred Ross, one of William Ross’s five daughters. William was born in Birkenhead, UK, the son of James Urquhart Ross, who was born in the Scottish Highlands. He migrated to Australia with his wife and children in 1866.

Helen, about 1860. She married James Redstone (from Winchester, England) in Sydney in 1862 and had four children. Remained in Sydney for some years.

Andrew, about 1865. Went to Bellingen, on the north coast of NSW some 300 miles north of Sydney, a beautiful farming area on the Bellingen River, near Coff’s Harbour, where a number of Scots had settled. He married Janet Anderson there in 1867. Her family was from Stirling, Scotland.

James, in 1866, with his wife, Mary Ann Marston, and four children. James, a journeyman joiner, had spent some years in England. His wife, Mary, was from Welshpool, and they had been living in Birkenhead prior to their emigration. The four children included William Frederick. James settled in Sydney, in the inner suburb of Newtown, where four more children were born, and then at Enfield, a suburb a little further out, in a house they called “Ferintosh”. James died in 1891 and was buried in the church yard of the parish church of St Thomas, Enfield

Jane, the youngest of the family, came out with James and his family. She went to Bellingen to her older brother Andrew, where she married David Anderson, brother of Andrew’s wife Janet.

Helen, Andrew and Jane all lie buried in the little bush cemetery at Fernmount, near Bellingen, along with some of their descendants. There are still Ross descendants living in that area.

Donald Robinson, September 1997

Note:
I have recently discovered that Helen and Andrew came out to Australia together in 1857, sailing in the ship, Alfred, out of Liverpool, arriving in Sydney in July. Helen, like Andrew and Jane, ended up in the Bellinger Valley of northern NSW.